The White Man's Audacity
“Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”—Fred Hampton
This republic is on a banana peel forreal.
How else to view frightened congresspersons crouched on the Senate floor in gas masks while Capitol Police drew weapons behind barricades to guard them. A sedition-minded dude dressed in a vest and hoodie, shoulder-flaunting a confederate flag down the hall. Insurgents clambering the walls outside the Capitol building like pseudo super villains who’ve come in contact with the stone that removes their powers.
How else to interpret Senator Josh Hawley greeting the mob with a raised fist. Arkansan Richard “Bigo” Barnett with his boots kicked up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, snatching a piece of her mail for a keepsake, ho-humming out of the building, and highsighting on camera, “I wrote her a nasty note, put my feet up on her desk, and scratched my balls.”
What else to make of a shirtless, tattooed, dear-antler-fur-hatted terrorist flexing for a picture in the alofted dais of the Speaker of the House. The ominous image of a gallows backdropped by the Capitol building. Bellicose rioters destroying the video equipment of the Associated Press.
And for the apologists and equivocators the seditionists’ sartorial tastes testify to their bigoted, racist hearts: A white-bearded man wearing a shirt that read “Camp Auschwitz” while posing in an unabashed group photo. A tandem decked out in Trump hats and T-shirts that read “MAGA Civil War Jan 6 2021.”
Those were just some of the sights on the infamous day in our nation’s history known as Wednesday. When I learned about the attempted coup, I was running errands and kept abreast by a torrent of texts. Since then, I’ve watched hours of TV, read numerous articles, and combed social media feeds, research that affirmed again and again an obvious-ass insight: If this mob was comprised of Black or brown people, and protesting, say, the equality and humanity of Black lives, there would have been a whole lot more bloodshed, would’ve been, in the least, the tremendous show of force used to clear Lafayette Square for the now lame-duck demagogue to take a photo in front of a church.
Many people were appalled at what they saw—Wednesday was the first time I heard the media refer to a group of mostly white people as “thugs”—but I was not one of them. To be appalled at what happened Wednesday is tantamount to believing the rhetoric that America tells itself and the world: that it is the greatest nation on earth, a beacon of liberty and justice for all. To be appalled at what happened Wednesday is to believe that America has ever been a true United States, not a country diseased by the psychosis of a supreme white race. To be astounded by what happened Wednesday is to be ignorant of what happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 when a mob of 2,000 white supremacist, upset that Blacks had been elected to a fusion government, overthrew it, killing 60 people—the only coup d’état on American soil.
A thinking, perceptive Black person with even a cursory knowledge of history, of which I count myself, could never believe those lies, which is why, per my unofficial survey, scores of Black and brown folks apprehended the siege of the Capitol building by almost all white people as a kind of dark comedy—one of my homeboys described it as a dramatic example of “white on white crime”—or in the least saw it as I did: yet another stark reminder of the man’s audacity.
Let me pull your coat on the white man’s audacity.
The white man’s audacity is a phenomenon born from the power and privilege they usurped, from a feeling of dominion over this country that was once known as manifest destiny. It is the belief that when America’s forefathers said “we the people” they meant, as our early documents attests, only white people. The white man’s audacity takes shape in sundry ways but one of them is in their utmost sense of safety.
For example, the actions of law enforcement—do remember, part of our society that evolved from groups that patrolled the enslaved—that ran the spectrum from downright accommodating, to a one-team-one-dream style of aiding and abetting. Them showing a remarkable sense of physical restraint and reticence to arrest while interacting with white terrorists, them being so kind as to move the barricade to allow a shouting swarm onto the grounds, them handholding an injured woman rioter down the Capitol steps, them posing for a selfie inside the Capitol with a red-hatted seditionist.
The white man’s audacity is the belief that all white people are human beings deserved of inalienable rights and then some, while everybody else has “no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Like the right to destroy a government that doesn’t conform to their world, a right by the way, that belongs only to him. The white man’s audacity does not concede; it coerces; it demands. It is the Save America March in which Trump, spouting debunked claims of electoral fraud and calling for retribution, spurred the siege in the first damn place. It is Rudy Giuliani in the same rally, screaming, “Let’s hold trial by combat.” It is both of those men walking free today—with no more censure than social media suspensions—after inciting an attempted coup that endangered congress, and along with fall out galore, lead to the death of at least five human beings.
Believe you me, if the treasonous events of Wednesday prove anything, it is that when this failing republic slips over the precipice, the white man’s audacity will own the lion’s share of the blame.
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